"It's a great time to be a woman in politics," chirps Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), perched, beaming, on a park bench. "Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, me…" Leslie is a visionary, a perfectionist who operates within a self-guffed mushroom cloud of nuclear positivity. The deputy director of Pawnee, Indiana's parks department, she's the sort of ambitious can-do apparatchik who calls a spade a spade, then organises a photo session with the nearest spade, then, warming to the theme, proposes the founding of Spade Day, for which she will, inevitably, dress as a spade. Leslie's hopes, dreams and repellent pastel pencil skirts are at the heart of Parks And Recreation (Wednesday, 10pm, BBC4), the first, glorious series of which arrives this week amid celestial parps of jubilation and the assurance that everything, ultimately, will be OK.

Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur (the brains behind the US version of The Office) Parks and Recreation is, like The Office, a mockumentary. But here, miraculously, the mockumentalism never grates. Instead, it's worn lightly, the whiplash whip pans, zoinks-y zoom shots and uneasy to-camera reaction shots serving as the perfect, unobtrusitve accompaniment to the series' small-town political humdrummery.Leslie is the ditzy pivot around which other lives clatter, ditzily. There is Tom, the wheeling-dealing office bronco, sniggering at Leslie's enthusiasm while doing gun-fingers at the stapler and calling everyone bitches. There is preternaturally apathetic intern April, and Mark, a jaded city planner with a penchant for co-eds with misspelled tribal back tattoos. And there is Ron Swanson, inscrutable alpha-git boss and libertarian, forever caught between a yawn and a howl of boredom, who thinks that all government blows, and parks should be privatised.

Together they womble through a sluggish bureaucratic netherverse, their remit encompassing over-elevated speed bumps, teenage dog poo fights, drunks clogging up playground slides and the removal of as many cartoon penises from one particular municipal wall as the department's limited budget will allow. Then a nurse, Ann (Rashida Jones, formerly of The Office), turns up at a "community outreach forum" to complain about a pit her bellend of a boyfriend fell into, and Leslie's sense of mission finally finds its object.

"This could be my Hoover Dam!" she squeals in the series opener, making a solemn "pinky promise" to turn the pit into a park before merrily corralling a subcommittee who never quite share the same levels of optimism for the project. Later episodes follow the development (or otherwise) of the park, while subplots take in the waxing and waning of various office romances and the misappropriation of a contractor's cheese.

This is comedy at its sweetest and least snarkful. There is no cruelty, or tub-thumping satire, or any of the "tragedy of the everyday" social commentary arsery that's stunk out Ricky Gervais's post-Office output. Instead there is a non-patronising depiction of community life: it's just there, as rich and intractable as Ron Swanson's moustache.

"But it's not as good as the second season!" honk long-term P&R devotees, hopping from trainer to trainer and waggling a finger in warning lest anyone make the fatal mistake of liking something without knowing in advance why they're wrong for liking it. Irritatingly, they're right: it's not as good as the second season. It's uneven. It's too broad-beamed in some places and slack-trousered in others. At times, it bears the unmistakeable baby giraffe gait of a new comedy struggling to find its knees, never mind its feet. But then, given that the second series of Parks And Recreation is among the most consistently funny sitcoms in sitcom history, it's probably only fair to cut these first six episodes some slack. As inferior first series of classic comedies go, it's a doozy: it's certainly sharper than the first series of Seinfeld, and it's a revolving winner's podium of excellence in comparison with the honking cavalcade of no that was The Black Adder.

Here, amid the incessant rat-tat-tat of majestic one-liners, is a comedy with genuine affection for and interest in its characters. For all their early, wibbly-wobbly buffoonishness, these are complex and believable souls, their relationships emitting such warmth you'll want to slather yourself in yoghurt lest you develop heat rash. "Dream with me," chirps Leslie of some minor civic proposal or other, ushering us into a future lined with golden clipboards, celestial stationery request forms and vanquished cartoon penises. Really, you'd be a bitch not to.

The Parks and Recreation star is playing an eye-bulging dead girlfriend in new film Life After Beth and doesn’t understand why fans find her ‘hot’, but says it’s female friendships she values most – thanks to Amy Poehler